First day of Flight School

Today I'm going to go over the basics of piloting small spacecraft. For a lot of you, the ten minutes of instruction I'm about to give you are all you'll get before they throw you into battle. If I were you, I'd glue my eyes and ears open.

I'm only going to ask you to remember five things today. Every one of you passed the entrance exam to be here, which in some cases means you guessed your own name right on the enlistment form. Therefore, you WILL remember the following five things:

1. Know your mission
2. Point the front of your ship at the enemy
3. Put the lead where it will hurt
4. Fly like a maniac
5. Be a Lurt - the world needs more Lurts

You may as well memorize that list, because if I ever run into you in a bar I'm going to make you repeat it.

1. KNOW YOUR MISSION

Before you plant your scrawny behind in the cockpit of one of these lovely spacecraft, press F2 and verify exactly what your mission will be. Don't be surprised if the mission is one of the following:
A) Capture the Flag [CTF]
B) Carrier Assault [CA]
C) Search and Destroy [SD]

This is important to know, because if you waste your time doing the wrong mission I WILL take your birthday away and you WILL get a lump of coal from Santa.

A) Capture the Flag [CTF] Missions

If you are on a CTF mission, you must either attack or defend. Dogfighting halfway between the carriers will not get you much cred, and you will lose.

If you attack, you should jump into the fastest fighter available to you. You should take a sneaky or a fast route to the enemy carrier and you need to GRAB that enemy FLAG. Bring it back. Repeat. Most of your group should be attacking (getting the enemy flag).

If you defend, firepower is more important than speed. Your targets are likely to be zippy little devils, so you should favor machine guns - the more the merrier. Swordfish, Piranhas, and Merlins are ideal for defending CTF.

CTF NOTE: Although this is technically not in the list of things I'm supposed to tell you, I think you ought to know that carriers have a top, a bottom, a front, and a back. The top of a carrier has a TOWER. The front of the carrier has EXTENDED LAUNCH RAILS. There is a little platform on top of the carrier in the back. You will find the enemy flag there. The flag looks like three coke bottles connected by their necks.

When you fly within five feet of the enemy flag, your ship will snag the flag. You will then bring that flag to the SAME PLATFORM except on OUR ship. Once you get within five feet of our flag platform, our ship will automatically take the enemy flag. As soon as our ship gets the flag, you will get a ton of cred and the enemy will be forced to find three more coke bottles and make a new flag.

YOU DO NOT GET CRED FOR DESTROYING THE ENEMY CARRIER IN CTF MISSIONS

B) Carrier Assault [CA] Missions

Like CTF missions, if you want to win you have to attack or defend. No screwing around in the middle of the map. There are NO CARRIERS in the middle of the map.

If you are going to attack, jump into a bomber. You can hurt the enemy carrier in a light fighter, but you won't win. Taking out turrets is not that important. If you are bombing the enemy carrier, you should destroy turrets as a matter of convenience and to avoid boredom while waiting for defenders and bomb cool-downs. Those of you that wish to become expert at bombing can sign up for the advanced bombing class. (ed. note - In other words, it will be covered in greater detail in another post.)

Your bombs are called torpedoes, due to 'military intelligence'. Remember that torpedoes are inert until they have activated, which takes about five seconds. In the sixth second, your torpedo should impact the enemy carrier. That's right, I'm telling you to fire torpedoes from a range of 700 or 800 meters.

If you are going to defend, firepower is king. Quad cannons are best for taking out bombers, but fast cannons will do the job. Nothing against Mambas, but dual machine guns (like those in the Mamba) are the LAST choice for destroying bombers.

Also, bomber pilots can be sneaky. You should patrol your ship to see if a bomber is lurking somewhere.

C) Search and Destroy [SD] Missions

Search and Destroy should really be called Slaughter and Don't Die. But we'd have to change the official abbreviation to [SDD], which would be expensive. The [SD] mission is a race to get a certain number of kills ranging from 10 to 75. If it's just you against 'Agent of Change', say on the Australian server, then you need 10 kills (and a rabbit's foot). If there are two full teams, you'll need 75 kills as a team.

In [SD], you are both killer AND corpse. Every time you kill an enemy, we get a point and we progress toward VICTORY. Every time you die, well, you just helped our foes. You traitor! That's right, dying is officially considered an act of treason in this mission. So the statistic that really matters here is the Kill/Death ratio.

Here are a few tips to avoid becoming a pinkish mist amongst the stars:
- Buddy up and stay near the pack. Even if the 'buddy' is a random guy that happened to launch just before you, fewer deaths will be racked up against our team if you look after a person on our team. Also, you'll get some easy kills since the slob that just jumped your buddy isn't paying attention to you. Usually.
- Keep close to rocks. You can't be attacked through a rock. You can't even be detected through a rock. Even if you can be seen by an enemy on your side of the rock, you'll be much less obvious. That long burst that should have killed you? Half of the bullets hit rocks, unless you're flying out in the open.
- Conserve health, ammo, and afterburners. When these are low, especially health, run! Fly around the asteroids in safe and inconspicuous ways until you're back in shape. I don't know...fly casual!
- Forget 'fair'. Fight dirty. Fight like a girl, if that's what it takes. Attack from behind if you can, or from an angle. But if you go head-to-head and you both die, all you accomplished is you just added one point to both teams' score. Not very impressive, and not very useful.

YOU DO NOT GET CRED FOR DESTROYING THE ENEMY CARRIER IN SEARCH AND DESTROY MISSIONS

We were all new players at one time, and I was a particularly new player in my day. This is why bombing the enemy carrier during CTF or SD missions is stilled called "Biffing it" to this day. Do not let this happen to you, lads. Bomb the carrier in Carrier Assault ONLY. Do the mission that you are assigned, so we don't have to go through the trouble of manually deleting your name from all of our data systems. It's just too much hassle.

lol, you forgot the Barracuda on Defense. Ferc Polo is goint to have words with you

The Barracuda is a fine ship, but the best dps in the game is from quad machine guns.

Good work here Bif, the "voice" it's written in is great!

Will be splicing some of this into the AFTAC, so get that S&D done, ASAP.

Bif wrote:The Barracuda is a fine ship, but the best dps in the game is from quad machine guns.

I prefer burst dmg.

Bif wrote:The Barracuda is a fine ship, but the best dps in the game is from quad machine guns.

FH-250 swordfish ftw!

Thanks for the encouragement, and you're welcome to any of the text that serves you. Jazzycat, can we get this training material into its own section, or at least a section of the 'hangar'?

Bif wrote:Thanks for the encouragement, and you're welcome to any of the text that serves you. Jazzycat, can we get this training material into its own section, or at least a section of the 'hangar'?

I actually had to 'search' for this topic off your username Bif, kept looking for it in the Gameplay forum but it was over here!

The Hanger is where players' reviews and discussions of the various ships takes place. Guides, tips, how-to's and anything of a training/instructional nature should go to the Gameplay forum, where it will get read directly or used, quoted, and linked to from one the Primers.

So even if your thread wanders off the forum's first page, it'll still be present in the AFTAC Primer sticky, and sourced/quoted/linked to directly for everyone to read. The Primers present the general information, while your topic/thread discusses the information and goes into further detail/debate. Your stuff's good and it'll get read/used by everyone, don't worry!

As for re-locating this stuff, I don't have Admin access so one of the others will have to move it, and the other CTF topic that's in this forum over to Gameplay... *hint,hint*

Admin, please move this post to the appropriate forum. Apparently, the hangar is for ship-specific discussions. Thanks!

Also, thanks for the work you put into this forum.